Reshaping The International Financial Architecture For Balanced And Stable Growth / Keynote Address by the Prime Minister of Malaysia, Dato Seri Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, at the
Inauguration of the Islamic Financial Services Board

In all today, there are some 3,000 registered trading entities called hedge funds, with an estimated equity base of some $200 billions, according to Hedge Fund Research, Inc., a hedge fund
analyst. Of these, less than half a dozen regularly engage as conscious strategy, in high-risk, politically-targetted attacks on vulnerable currencies or markets. While these »global macro«
hedge funds, as the latter are often called, often operate out of offices in New York or other US cities, none of them are »American« in any real sense. The management office may be in
New York, but the legal corporation is hidden away, offshore, far away from the prying eyes of US or other tax authorities, in places such as Netherlands Antilles or Cayman Islands. Further,
to avoid any legal scrutiny from US authorities, these global macro funds permit only non-US citizens or non-US institutional investors to join the equity share of the fund, usually European
or other foreign banks. It's all completely unregulated and highly secret.

Japan Inc. in the Debt Trap

With the Yen so dangerously high that it hurts export profits, the only sector of profit in the ailing economy, Japan is precisely
where the Euroland powers want the second largest industrial economy to be for now. At anytime it suits Euroland financial powers, they can now pull the plug on Japan by forcing the Yen
even higher, against the Euro. European exports already are far more competitive against Japanese in the past 15 months in world markets. Euroland is intent on eliminating Japan as a
future competitor. It is dangerously close to its goal, helped enormously by the cultural paralysis of the internal Japanese crisis since the collapse of Cold War structures. In this context, a
qualitative rethinking of American-Japanese relations is of urgent interest.

The World Bank and Japan:

How Godzilla of the Ginza and King Kong of H Street Got Hitched / By Edith Terry

Japan Policy Research Institute Working Paper #70 (August 2000)

Buried in news about the anti-globalization protests, a major theme of the annual spring meeting of the World Bank and IMF in April 2000 in Washington DC, was the Japanese demand for a
larger voice for itself and other Asian nations. As protesters stormed the barricades outside, a senior Japanese official told the New York Times, »There's a sense that this has always been
a white man's club, and that needs some rethinking« (April 17, 2000).

IMF revisits the scene of the crime

Unless East Asia faces up to the fact that the Asia financial crisis, given the policies and business practices of the decade
preceding it, was inevitable and had best be viewed as salutary and an opportunity for in-depth reform, there will be an early recurrence. The IMF's new managing director, sweet-talking
Horst Koehler, does no one a favor by listening to people (and governments) talking self-serving nonsense.